...and the award for most tireless, knowledgeable and patient technical support goes to.... Over the past month or so the effort to find and move to new hosting was considerable. It was certainly much more involved than I had anticipated.…
There’s nothing like your site going down routinely to lend a sense of urgency to the search for an alternative hosting solution. While my circumstance was not quite as dire as that pictured right, it certainly felt similar.
The newly live server at VPS.NET was crashing at least once every day or two, but it remained live while I poked around the TKL web site investigating the other hosting providers that had partnered with the project. The biggest was Amazon’s EC2, but recent events lead me to shy away from Amazon for my own purposes.
Welcome to act two of our little saga, whereupon our protagonist, having found that his existing shared blog host is now unreliable, has set out in search of a new host. A private host. Very possibly a virtual host. In fact, the situation has become very cloudy indeed.
In some regards the growth of a blog such as this, and the related hosting issues, is a little like being a teenager. Living at your parents home is very cheap, but you’re limited in what you can do, and the sort of traffic that they will allow. Ultimately your desire for freedom will force you to find your own place to live, where you have greater control of what goes on, even if that means you always have to clean up after yourself.
The decision to seek a more private host is only one step in this migratory process. The next question that arises is, “what kind of host?” Windows? Linux? If Linux, what distribution? Which supporting applications? How much CPU, memory, storage, etc?
In the three years since it began this blog has been through a number of transitions. The most recent being just a few weeks ago. This is a little tale of that experience, offered to help anyone else who might be following a similar path. This little drama comes in the form of three acts. In this first act we examine the history of the site that lead up to recent events.
My efforts at blogging began in fall of 2007 on the free hosting at WordPress.com. While a fine place to get started I eventually wanted to tweak WordPress beyond the scope that was allowed on that service. In particular, the desire to include more multimedia content provided the motivation to move the site to a paid host.
After several troublesome months with our prior hosting company I finally moved this site to a new host this week. The very fact that you’re seeing this post says that DNS has changed and you’re at the new place.
This is an entirely new construction, so there may be a little dust still to be tidied up and a bit of paint yet to be applied. Rest assured that I’ll be addressing any deficiencies as I find them.
In September 2008 I made the leap from from the free hosting at WordPress.com to a shared server account at BlueHost. Their service was fine back in the early days, but a shared host can be a problem.
Blogging about blogging is a kind of meta-blogging. I've not done much of that as yet, but this is something of a start. I'm even adding "meta" as a category for posts. Now on to the idea at hand... In…